Canada’s immigration gap has risen to 2.4 million, with more than 250,000 applications added to the pile in just one month.
This is according to the latest data from Canada on Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC) for all categories, from temporary residence and permanent residence to applications for citizenship.
“I have not seen such delays in 16 years of my career as an immigration lawyer,” said Rick Lamana, director of immigration services at Fragomen Canada, in a telephone interview with CTV News on Thursday.
“Before the pandemic, things were going pretty well.”
The increased backlog has already led to frustration for those waiting to receive an update to the app from the IRCC.
The latest data only raises more questions than the answers of the unknown candidates.
Don’t see the graphs below? Press here
Although among the top five destinations with immigrant-friendly policies around the world, Canada has seen a growing backlog since the pandemic.
The long processing time and the lack of communication and transparency are some of the many problems highlighted by families who turned to CTVNews.ca.
‘EXTREMELY STRESSED’
Lamana said changing processing times prevents families and even businesses from planning ahead.
“If you have to go online right now and look at the processing time outside of India, it will take almost a year,” he said.
Part of the problem he pointed out was that the IRCC faced a cascading effect from the fall of Afghanistan and then from the pandemic.
At COVID-19, IRCC staff were not considered “key workers”, so the backlog only started to grow. Now there is a huge backlog with the war in Ukraine, he added. Between March 17 and June 8, 2022, 296,163 applications were received under the program.
For most, the long delays have postponed their life decisions as they continue to wait in another country.
Kazim Ali is applying for permanent residency through the Express Entry program in 2020 from Pakistan and has been waiting to receive an update ever since. He said he had no idea how long he would have to wait until he started his new life in Canada with his wife.
“Our lives have been cut short due to lack of communication and a lack of a clear timetable for delays in processing,” Ali said in an interview with Pakistan’s CTVNews.ca during a call for an increase on Wednesday.
Ali said the expected processing time is six months at the time of filing.
Despite repeated emails, Ali’s application seems to have stopped. He said the IRCC helpline is not good for those outside Canada.
He was told to contact the visa office, which is processing his application. It is currently based in the London, UK office, with no updates.
Ali ended his long-term plans – including his career, buying a home and family planning.
He said the wait now had an agonizing effect on his mental and emotional health and was “extremely stressful” for the couple.
“The IRCC really needs a reality check and needs to understand that it not only processes a bunch of documents, but also makes decisions that affect the lives of families and future generations,” Ali said.
In a statement emailed to CTVNews.ca, IRCC communications officer Jeffrey MacDonald said the inventory of apps had increased during the pandemic while health and travel restrictions were in place, and it would take some time to fully recovered.
MacDonald said the IRCC is moving towards a more integrated, modernized and centralized work environment to help speed up application processing worldwide.
“COVID IS NO LONGER AN APOLOGY”
But Mustakima Gazi, who works as a long-term care assistant in a pandemic, said COVID-19 could no longer be an excuse.
Gazi, a Canadian citizen from London, Ontario, has been waiting for her husband’s application for a husband since December 2021 and has seen increasing progress since she last spoke to CTVNews.ca in May.
But although the application is reaching the next stage, it remains discouraged.
The couple is part of a Facebook community that includes families waiting for IRCC updates. She said some who applied for a medical examination (a requirement for those applying for permanent residence) last year are still waiting to receive an update from the IRCC.
Gazi’s husband lives alone in the Netherlands and is under enormous mental stress at his request.
It makes things worse, she said, the processing time of the online portal, which continues to change.
She said one would think that the processing time would be reduced as applications are processed.
“But that’s not the case,” she said. “At one point the forecast time was 12 months, and the next week it was 23 months.
Gazi has tried to call the IRCC many times to get more information about our application, hoping to speed things up, but has never been able to contact anyone who could give her any answers about the condition.
“Sometimes the helpline just breaks without even queuing me,” she said.
The only time she contacted, the IRCC agent tried to help, but was unable to provide any updates as the application is being processed outside of Canada.
“Everyone is fighting and trying their best to get through these difficult times. “We want to be close to our families who can support us,” she said. But delay leads to nothing but despair.
“ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION”
Among those disappointed by the lack of communication and transparency is Anne Marie Trad, a Canadian citizen who has been waiting to be with her husband Pierre Achaltuni since 2019.
The couple married in 2018 in Beirut, Lebanon and Trad applied for a marriage visa from there in 2019.
More than 50 months have passed since then.
Trad has tried all the routes to get updates: she contacted the MP’s office, called her local MP, filled out web forms and called the IRCC helpline. But nothing helped.
Her husband’s wife’s application was filed outside of Canada (Beirut), so navigating the status of the application is more complex than processing it in Canada.
Trad said the status says “carrying out an inspection” from 2019.
Hoping for a faster trip, she applied for a visa to visit Canada in 2020. But even that did not gain momentum.
Trad last visited her husband in August 2021 and is now worried that the ongoing crisis in Lebanon may make it increasingly difficult to make such visits.
The three-year wait affected the couple’s mental health – leading to anxiety and depression. Trad said her husband has lost a lot of weight and she is worried about his health.
The couple took legal action last year to get immigration officials to act on files caught in delays – mandamus.
The legal route is definitely not cheap, Trad said, but she sees no better way to speed up the process.
“We just want to get our lives back on track after losing three years of waiting,” she said.
WHAT DOES IRCC DO?
To support the processing and resettlement of new permanent residents in Canada, the government has allocated $ 2.1 billion over five years and a current $ 317.6 million for new funding announced in the 2022 budget.
With additional funding of $ 85 million from the Economic and Fiscal Update for 2021, the IRCC seeks to reduce the inventory of applications accumulated during the pandemic by hiring new staff to process, digitize applications and implement technology-based solutions. such as digital reception and advanced analysis.
Lamana said hiring will help reduce the backlog, but that in itself will take some time.
“Even if the IRCC hires more people, it could take months before any group of new recruits is truly effective in dealing with the background, as this will require new training,” he said.
He said digitalisation is a step in the right direction, but even that could take years before it is finally implemented and may not help those currently waiting, and could help new candidates in 2023.
“This is a very difficult situation,” he said.
HOW DID SUCH EVIL BECOME?
Many immigration law firms have noticed a jump in mandamus applications. In more than 10 months, the Toronto-based law firm Abramovich & Tchern has processed more than 200 mandamus files.
It is unfortunate that candidates have to take this route, Lev Abramovich, an immigration lawyer at Abramovich & Tchern, told CTVNews.ca on Thursday.
Abramovich, who does not represent any of the candidates in this story, said that it was not COVID-19 itself that created the lag, but ultimately revealed “the archaic structure and management style, which is not very agile.
“After the pandemic hit, the CPUs were operating with very limited capacity and this partly contributed to the increase in the backlog.
Some categories of applications filed during the pandemic were on paper and lay in offices, collecting dust for many months.
Abramovich said most of the applications his company received came from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, India and China.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Lamana said one solution is to focus on prioritizing groups or processes and correcting them, rather than trying to have a comprehensive approach. “So people understand how to handle these applications,” he said.
Abramovich said the existing system must be “centralized and flexible”.
Many times an application is stuck in an office outside of Canada, which may be partially functional for a number of reasons, such as shutdowns or remote work orders.
He said a centralized flexible system would manage applications by redistributing them to different offices.
And they will be processed, more or less based on when they entered, not based on …
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